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Debbie Qaqish is The Queen of Revenue Marketing,™ a term she coined in 2011. As Principal Partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, Debbie manages global client relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives. She has been helping B2B companies drive revenue growth for over 35 years.

Debbie is author of the award-winning book – “Rise of the Revenue Marketer,” Chancellor of Revenue Marketing University, and host of WRMR Power TalkRadio for Revenue Marketing Leaders, which showcases marketing executives from companies like GE and Microsoft sharing advice on marketing transformation. A PhD candidate, Debbie also teaches an MBA course at College of William & Mary on Revenue Marketing.

In March 2016, Kapost named Debbie among the Top 40 Most Inspiring Women in Marketing. For the last five years, Debbie has been named One of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management. She has also won SLMA’s Top 20 Women to Watch distinction for three consecutive years. In 2014 FierceCMO Magazine named Debbie one of the Top 10 Women CMOs to Watch.

Today’s B2B CMO is the hardest working person in corporate America. She is faced with not one or two, but three transformational challenges: 1) running marketing like a business by enabling revenue growth 2) company growth and 3) growth in shareholder value. This CMO is charged with not only digitally transforming marketing, but helping transform legacy company business models for the digital age. Finally, she is responsible for leading the pivot from being a product-focused company to being a customer-centric organization. I’m exhausted just writing this!

As I work with and observe successful B2B CMOs in action, I see a common thread around their success in addressing these three big challenges. The thread is a STRATEGIC marketing operations (MO) team that performs beyond typical MO expectations.

I recently hosted a webinar to explore the role of STRATEGIC marketing operations in enabling CMO success to address the three big challenges. The webinar – The Rise of the Strategic Marketing Operations Function – attracted hundreds of registrants with both executive and functional titles, and from well-known companies. In this article, I’ll share the key themes of the webinar, responses from a poll, and key take-aways for the audience.

The Poll Question

I always ask questions to involve my audience in every presentation. For this webinar I was interested in which of the three big challenges listeners supported. I was both surprised and pleased with the answers. Close to 80% of the webinar participants stated they support digital transformation. I expected this to have the highest response rates. Next, 73% reported helping marketing to adopt financial accountability and close to 60% are involved in the pivot to customer centricity. This micro-survey supports the idea that the CMO and the marketing ops organization is tasked with addressing all three big challenges. Of course, this data point does not tell us how well the challenges are being addressed.

Regular vs Strategic Marketing Operations

The premise of the webinar focused on the difference between a regular and a strategic marketing operations function and the effect on the three big challenges. A typical marketing operations charter looks like this:

“Our charter is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing so they can attain their goals.”

Inherent in this definition is a “we” vs “they” sentiment, a lack of direct accountability, a reactive orientation and a tactical approach. I found many MO groups working with this kind of charter. However, in the last 12 months as MO continues to mature as a capability, I’ve seen a transformation in the role of MO. The charter for the emerging STRATEGIC marketing operations function reads:

“Our charter is to act as a proactive and equally accountable partner with our stakeholders to help envision, enable, and operationalize transformational strategies that drive business results and create competitive differentiation.”

This definition describes a partnering relationship, an equally accountable relationship, a proactive orientation, and a strategic purpose. Words are powerful and reviewing these two charters exemplifies the difference between a regular and a strategic MO function. I advise that every MO function needs a charter, regardless of your stage of maturity. Now that we have established a baseline understanding of a regular vs a strategic MO function, let’s review the drivers of the transformation – the CMO’s three big challenges.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation encompasses both transforming marketing and transforming the company’s business models. These two actions are overlapping in many companies. In the marketing organization with a mature and strategic marketing operations capability, I often see early digital transformation in marketing that becomes a blueprint for the company digital transformation. Companies are only about 25% complete on their journey of digital transformation. In addition, many executives view this kind of transformation as critical to survival and certainly as a way to create competitive advantage.

In companies where the MO function is strategic, they are involved in both transforming marketing digitally and acting as a key member of the larger digital transformation team. In companies that have a regular MO function, marketing is frequently not included as part of the strategic team guiding wider company digital transformation. How marketing is or is not positioned as part of a wider company transformation becomes relevant and important when we consider the current emphasis on customer focus.

Customer Focus

During the webinar, the second CMO challenge we discussed was customer focus. We live in the customer engagement economy where the customer has all the control. Thanks to the tsunami of new apps and technologies that allow consumers to access anything we want, anytime we want it, we have all been conditioned to expect this kind of experience in every area of our lives including business. We want and expect the expediency, the personalization and the clarity experienced in our daily consumer interactions to be replicated in our B2B world.

This new type of customer with an incredibly different set of expectations is driving the bus. The good news for businesses is that pivoting to a customer focus pays, and pays big. Research from Genesys states that companies who focus on customer experience improve customer retention by 42%, improve customer satisfaction by 33% and improve cross-sell/ups-sell opportunities by 32%. In this confluence of market drivers, B2B companies are turning to marketing to help lead the pivot away from product-centricity to customer-centricity. And within marketing, it is the marketing operations function that is best positioned to drive and operationalize this company transformation – if it is a strategic MO function.

I’ve observed many companies in the midst of this pivot. If marketing does not have a mature and strategic MO function, marketing is not viewed as a leader for this transformation. If marketing has a strategic MO function, marketing becomes a leader in this transformation. Key attributes of the strategic MO function that allow for this leadership include a holistic view of the customer life-cycle, a customer-centric martech stack, a customer-centric data governance model, a cross-functional process orientation, and a zest for producing and sharing customer insights that improve decision making across the company. Given this set of attributes, the regular MO function that only looks to improve efficiency and effectiveness in a reactive model, will fall short.

Business Accountability

I’ve been working to transform marketing from a cost center to a revenue center since I bought my first marketing automation system in 2004. Since then, I’ve worked with hundreds of companies to help them on the Revenue Marketing™ Journey. In addition, my PhD dissertation (soon to be published) is about how the B2B CMO adopts financial accountability. This is a long-winded way to say that business accountability is a major passion of mine.

In relation to our webinar, adopting business accountability in terms of pipeline, revenue, company growth and shareholder value represents one of the big challenges for the CMO. It’s interesting that in a tech-infused world, CMOs still struggle to report financial results. IBM reported that over 80% of CMOs feel pressure to deliver financial results, yet only about a third actually do so. One observation on this dynamic is that the CMO with a mature and strategic MO function is in that widely-envied one third. I often refer to marketing operations as the CMO’s mulligan or second chance. The marketing team without a MO function will greatly struggle to tie their activities to revenue. They just don’t have the technical and analytical acumen required. As the CMO builds out the MO capability, her chances to demonstrate revenue impact increases. However, the charter of a regular MO team is more about efficiency and effectiveness in response to more tactical initiatives. It is interesting that in 2016 and in 2017 every leader of MO that I talked with did not have compensation tied to meeting a revenue number.

This began changing in 2018 as MO as a capability continued to mature. More MO leaders are working with the CMO to build and have accountability for a Revenue Marketing machine that is repeatable, predictable and scalable. This is a huge shift for marketing and for the MO function to make. While progress can be made with a regular MO capability, it is the strategic MO capability that brings credibility to the numbers and allows the CMO to forecast marketing impact on revenue.

Conclusion

The webinar represented a dialog on the changing role of and set of responsibilities for the strategic MO organization. It highlighted the evolution of the MO capability and included examples of that evolution. It also hit a real nerve for MO practitioners who are too often viewed as button-pushers and tactical techies. Given where MO sits in an organization, the access to data and technology plus the knowledge, skills and experience they have, the MO team should be viewed and used both to help shape strategy and to operationalize that strategy. There is a new breed of MO practitioner emerging and the smart CMO will make sure she is on that team.